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Tag: irises

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (2 of 10)

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From “Iris pallida” in Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin:

“Common in gardens throughout Western Europe, this perfect iris produces pale violet-blue flowers with white beards that are tipped yellow towards the back. The falls and standards, unlike those of many other bearded species, are very short and form a neatly shaped flower that is not damaged in poor weather conditions. In the wild the flower can vary from deep violet to almost pink. It is scented. The grey green foliage is resistant to disease. Early hybridizers used this species as a parent to create other bearded irises. It is sometimes known as Dalmatian iris.”

From “Blue” in Poems Purely for Pleasure by Raymond W. Groves:

Any color that is blue
Gives a thing the proper hue.
Be it raiment, sky, or water
Or the ink beside the blotter
Blankets for an unborn child
Or blue iris, growing wild
Music or the mood I’m in, or
The haze that’s mountain climbin’
Violets in a wooded nook
Bluebirds singing near the brook
Anything worthwhile, it’s true
Deserves to be a shade of blue.

Hello!

This is the second of ten posts featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery toward the end of April. The first post is Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10).

For this post, we’re going to explore some of the differences between the irises in my first post and those in this one, considering them visually while glancing at what those visual differences tell us about the iris’s botanical history. These blue-violet irises are likely Iris pallida, a close relative, or perhaps friends with benefits; and they look a lot like the I. pallida species as described in the quotation from Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia above.

Here I’ve placed a pair of images from the first post on top of two from this post, where it’s likely that you immediately recognize the color differences between the dark, saturated purple of the first two and the lighter blue-violet of the second two. This is more than just a color difference, however: the saturated purple occurs in conjunction with a petal structure that’s thicker than that of the blue-violet irises. Although this comparison isn’t precise, the purple irises would feel more like a piece of copy paper, and the blue-violet irises would feel more like tissue paper.

The structural differences also mean that the two kinds of irises react differently to the lighting conditions where they’re photographed. Hold a piece of tissue paper in front of a light bulb and you’ll see that much more light passes through it than copy paper held in the same position. This means that the purple irises will look nearly the same when the lighting is coming from the side or from the back, whereas the camera will pick up significant differences in the appearance of the blue-violet irises with side lighting or backlighting. As I mentioned previously, the lighting conditions did vary a lot during my photoshoot — from cloud-filtered to bright sunlight — even over the fifteen minutes that passed when I took these photos. So as you progress toward the bottom of these galleries, you can see how backlighting in particular affected the appearance of the flowers: parts of the flower that contrast with the blue-violet color of the petals (especially their orange beards and the internal parts of the flower behind the beards) exhibit a natural-looking glow.

How the two kinds of irises appear in photographs also gives us a chance to observe other characteristics. They’re both bearded irises (because they have beards!), with the purple ones — standing about three feet tall — classified as tall bearded irises and the blue-violet ones — standing about two feet tall — classified as intermediate or medium bearded irises. The height of the purple irises means that they have to produce very strong stems to support the weight of a large, complex flower blossom; and, from my observations, the tall irises were much less likely to show damage from recent thunderstorms or wind than the blue-violet ones, which had plenty of stems that ended up growing horizontally (like the example I showed in the first post).

The thicker flower petals on the purple irises also supported a genetic alteration: breeders selected irises that produced petals with ruffled edges that, over many generations, eventually developed the substantial amount of ruffling that you see in the two top photos above. The development of ruffled irises — taking place over a period of about five decades up to the 1980s — was both an aesthetic effort and a practical one aimed at strengthening the petals of larger iris flowers. (If you’d like to learn more about this part of iris history, search for variations of the word “ruffle” in the book I quoted up top, Irises: A Gardener’s Encyclopedia by Claire Austin, or in Austin’s companion book Iris: The Classic Bearded Varieties.)

With their thinner and more translucent petals, the blue-violet irises, on the other hand, often show only a slight curving at the petals’ edges (hinting at the possibility of ruffling) but would never have supported as much of a ruffle as the purple ones. And the edge curve often recedes and flattens on the blue-violet petals as the flower opens and ages; whereas it remains mostly intact on the purple ones throughout the blooms’ lifecycles.

Being able to photograph batches of similar irises like these (and those in future posts) from Oakland’s new plantings gave me a chance to research observations like this, following a kind of compare and contrast methodology where I would have plenty of recently opened flowers to compare with those that had been around for a few days. There are so many irises at so many different stages of development that I can use the plantings in a way that might be comparable to time-lapse photography of a single iris. We’ll explore these relationships in more detail in some upcoming posts, and engage in further examination of how the location and use of older iris plantings and newer ones reflect the cemetery’s history and its design as a memorial garden.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Nature’s Palette: Exploring Iris Colors, Their Culture, and Their History (1 of 10)

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From The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim:

“All down the stone steps on either side were periwinkles in full flower, and she could now see what it was that had caught at her the night before and brushed, wet and scented, across her face. It was wistaria. Wistaria and sunshine…. Here indeed were both in profusion. The wistaria was tumbling over itself in its excess of life, its prodigality of flowering; and where the pergola ended the sun blazed on scarlet geraniums, bushes of them, and nasturtiums in great heaps, and marigolds so brilliant that they seemed to be burning, and red and pink snapdragons, all outdoing each other in bright, fierce colour….

“The ground behind these flaming things dropped away in terraces to the sea, each terrace a little orchard…. And beneath these trees were groups of blue and purple irises, and bushes of lavender, and grey, sharp cactuses, and the grass was thick with dandelions and daisies, and right down at the bottom was the sea….

“Colour seemed flung down anyhow, anywhere; every sort of colour, piled up in heaps, pouring along in rivers…. [Flowers] that grow only in borders in England, proud flowers keeping themselves to themselves over there, such as the great blue irises and the lavender, were being jostled by small, shining common things like dandelions and daisies and the white bells of the wild onion, and only seemed the better and the more exuberant for it.”

From “Flower-de-Luce” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Complete Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: 

Beautiful lily, dwelling by still rivers,
Or solitary mere,
Or where the sluggish meadow-brook delivers
Its waters to the weir!

Thou laughest at the mill, the whir and worry
Of spindle and of loom,
And the great wheel that toils amid the hurry
And rushing of the flame.

Born in the purple, born to joy and pleasance,
Thou dost not toil nor spin,
But makest glad and radiant with thy presence
The meadow and the lin.

The wind blows, and uplifts thy drooping banner,
And round thee throng and run
The rushes, the green yeomen of thy manor,
The outlaws of the sun.

The burnished dragon-fly is thine attendant,
And tilts against the field,
And down the listed sunbeam rides resplendent
With steel-blue mail and shield.

Thou art the Iris, fair among the fairest,
Who, armed with golden rod
And winged with the celestial azure, bearest
The message of some God.

Thou art the Muse, who far from crowded cities
Hauntest the sylvan streams,
Playing on pipes of reed the artless ditties
That come to us as dreams.

O flower-de-luce, bloom on, and let the river
Linger to kiss thy feet!
O flower of song, bloom on, and make forever
The world more fair and sweet.

Hello!

This is the first of ten posts (yes, that’s right, ten!) featuring photographs of irises that I took at Oakland Cemetery in one lengthy visit toward the end of April. As I mentioned in a previous post (see Studying Japanese Quince): we hope you like irises, because we’re going to spend the next five weeks looking at the photographs and exploring them in different contexts, like their colors, their culture and history, their botanical characteristics, and, sometimes, their appearance in literature (like the excerpt from The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim and the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow at the top of this post).

There are 323 photos in the whole series, which means that I’ve been spending plenty of time not only post-processing each image, but organizing them in ways that might make sense for further exploration. As I often do, I’ve arranged the photos by their dominant colors, and ended up with these eight groupings to help me streamline processing in Lightroom and give me some anchors for further research. Here are the groupings in the order I’ll be presenting the photos:

  • Purple and Blue: 50 photos
  • Brown and Gold: 42 photos
  • Purple with Variegated Leaves: 19 photos
  • Purple Plicata: 36 photos
  • White: 38 photos
  • White Standards, Purple Falls: 50 photos
  • Pink Standards, Purple Falls: 26 photos
  • Yellow and Orange: 62 photos

How’s it possible to end up with a large collection like this — which you might describe as so many irises in so little time? I’m glad you asked! There have always been plenty of irises to photograph throughout the gardens, but a few years ago, the caretakers expanded their iris collections by several acres (near the Greenhouse Valley section toward the northeast corner of this map), where they constructed a number of new rectangular garden plots featuring just irises, segregated by color as I’ve done here. And that of course means that if you visit the cemetery during peak iris blooming time (late April or early May), you are pleasantly confronted with hundreds or perhaps even thousands of individual irises, fully flowering in open spaces, just waiting for you to take their pictures. It’s actually a fascinating addition to a Victorian garden cemetery like Oakland, where plantings are typically associated with various memorial structures and memorial plots, to have this separate set of gardens that have been designed as recently planted independent arrangements of flowers, unaffiliated with the garden’s overall historical design.

The day I took all these photographs started out overcast with some bright but filtered sunlight — my favorite conditions for photographing flowers — but as the morning progressed, the clouds came and went repeatedly so I got to experiment with a variety of lighting conditions including filtered sunlight, stark yellow/white light, and both backlighting and side-lighting. While I’ll sometimes abandon a photoshoot when the lighting conditions change like this, I decided to adapt to it and keep on shooting — in part because we had recurring severe thunderstorms of such frequency in April (continuing through almost all of May) that I thought I might not get another chance to photograph the irises without substantial storm damage. So as you progress through these photos, you’ll see some like this one…

… that adapted to getting storm-battered by adjusting the trajectory of the stem horizontally while still retaining enough upright support to top the stem with a nearly perfectly formed flower. Let’s keep that resilience and ability to adapt to the environment in mind as we move forward with explorations of the iris’s historical persistence, its botanical properties, and its cultural and memorial connections.

I chose Longfellow’s poem to accompany this first post because of the way it seamlessly blends these different connections. “Born in purple, born to joy and pleasance” — for example — doesn’t just describe the color of irises like those in my photographs, but also takes us back to the historical association of irises with royalty or aristocracy. Variations in purple or blue colors and the shape of an iris flower gradually emerged to symbolize royal courts or coats of arms through an association with heraldry, often described as fleur-de-lis (or in Longfellow’s rendering “flower-de-luce”). While there’s some overlap where fleur-de-lis may refer to the shapes of irises or to similarly shaped lilies (abstracting the shape of either flower to a drawing yields similar results), the two remain largely interchangeable in the cultural history of both plants (see Fleur-de-lis Origins for more on that) — and Longfellow clearly intended his poem to describe irises, as he did explicitly in the sixth stanza. That he started out by calling the plant a lily, then reverted to calling it an iris further on, reflects these historical connections.

While Longfellow used evocative colors to induce our understanding of iris history, he also used color to help us see irises in their natural environment, weaving his chosen palette throughout verses in the poem. He was sometimes explicit about that (like the “born in purple” phrase we just discussed), but more often he used an approach that we might call “reflective” by describing the iris’s surroundings. Words and phrases like flame, radiance, green yeomen, burnished, sunbeam, steel-blue, golden rod, celestial azure, and sylvan streams all imply colors that Longfellow found surrounding the irises — yet any of them could be equally attributed to the colors of an iris plant itself, especially when considering how many different colored irises there are, and the enormous variety of colors any individual iris can display. Pick any of my photographs below (or in the rest of this series) and you can find most of these colors; cruise the internet for photos of irises and their descriptions, and you’ll encounter similar phrases in those descriptions; wander for a while among iris gardens at a place like Oakland Cemetery — and whether you’re looking at newly planted acres, or older plantings associated with memorials, it will be quite obvious why the name of the iris itself was derived from the Greek word for rainbow.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris Domestica Fireworks (2 of 2)

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From “Blackberry Lily/Leopard Lily (Iris Domestica) in The Illustrated Guide to Nature by The National Georgraphic Society:

“The Blackberry Lily spreads wide its distinctly spotted tepals (look-alike petals and sepals) as if to draw attention to its short-lived beauty, as each blossom lasts only one day.

“A native of China, the Blackberry Lily has escaped cultivation to become widely established in North America. Showy flower sprays appear in the midst of fan-shaped clusters of long, narrow, flat, medium-green leaves. Pear-shaped seedpods form in late summer. When ripe, they split to reveal a cluster of shiny blackberry-like seeds, the source of the plant’s common name; the spots, of course, lend another name — Leopard Lily. A species of a different genus also goes by the name Leopard Lily; Lilium pardalinum, native to California, has somewhat similarly spotted tepals that curl. Its range does not overlap with that of Iris domestica.”

From “Belamcanda” in The Gardener’s Guide to Growing Irises by Geoff Stebbings:

“This genus is native to China, Japan and northern India. The plants look like iris, with fans of quite wide leaves. Given a moist, humus-rich soil they will grow outdoors in temperate zones and should survive most winters, but they are not long-lived plants. There is just one species, B. chinensis, which usually grows to 60cm (2ft) when in flower.

“The inner and outer petals are very similar except that the inner ones are slightly smaller, and the flowers open flat, facing upwards. The petals are orange, spotted with red at the base, and are attractive but not showy. This plant is called blackberry lily because the seed pods open to reveal shiny black seeds.”

Hello!

This is the second of two posts featuring Iris domestica from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens. The first post is Iris Domestica Fireworks (1 of 2).

Here’s one of the images from the galleries below, where you can see some of the unique features of Iris domestica that add to its photographic charm but also serve important botanical purposes. As the flowers age, the petals fold and twist in on each other, forming a tight spiral that retains much of the color from the underside of each petal. This change may occur within a few hours of blooming, as Iris domestica flowers often open and close within a single day.

Coincidentally, they share this trait with daylilies — and their aging process is another example of flower senescence, as I described in one of my previous posts, Red and Yellow Daylilies. This is a complex chemical and biological process, one that enables the plant to conserve energy and retain water, as the spiraled flowers will consume less energy and require less water. The plant can then redirect that energy and water toward the growth of other flowers and stems.

In the classic iris book The Genus Iris by William Rickatson Dykes, the author describes the process for Iris dichotoma, a closely-related iris that exhibits the same behaviors:

“This Iris probably produces more flowers on each stem than any other Iris. The stem is much branched and even the branches often issue in pairs at the same point. Moreover from each spathe as many as five or even more flowers are produced in succession. Each flower, unfortunately, lasts only a few hours and often only opens in the afternoon… However, such is the profusion of flowers that there are usually four or six to be found open at once on each plant.

“Another peculiarity of this Iris lies in the fact that it does not begin to bloom until about the middle of August and then continues in flower for about three weeks or a month. Each flower as it dies twists up in a curious spiral and often falls off together with the ovary between which and the pedicel there is an articulation.”

Sounds complicated, of course, but here we don’t worry too much about chemical and biological mechanisms we don’t (yet!) fully understand. You can click the links above for definitions of the three key botanical terms, if you like, but the process (somewhat speculatively) amounts to this:

The aging flower twists in a spiral, possibly to help the plant conserve water and energy. The position of the twisted spiral at the top of the seedpods helps protect the pods from insect or weather damage, until the pods themselves begin to dry out and open to reveal black seeds inside (the behavior that led to the common name “Blackberry Lily”). The seeds are then distributed by any of several seed dispersal methods, including gravity, wind, rain, and creatures like birds or passerby people.

All this enables the plant to make new plants — so I can take pictures of them again next year. Plants are both smart AND photogenically cooperative!

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

Iris Domestica Fireworks (1 of 2)

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From “Perennials for Summer Bloom” in Sunbelt Gardening: Success in Hot-Weather Climates by Tom Peace:

“Blackberry lily (Belamcanda chinensis) is, despite its deceptive common name, actually a member of the iris family. Vigorous, healthy fans of leaves arise from a small rhizome that expands only slowly over time and grows to two feet tall before blooming….

“The valuable foliage is then embellished by open, branched flower stalks rising above the leaves, producing a succession of orange-and-red-spotted, six-petaled blooms. (Hybrids called candy lilies expand the color range to yellow and purples.)

“The effect is like slow-motion fireworks, but the show doesn’t stop there. Swollen seedpods develop through late summer and split open in fall to reveal berrylike clusters of shiny black seeds. These readily germinate the following spring, increasing the size of Belamcanda colonies.”

From “Blackberry Lily” in Lilies and Related Flowers by Brian Mathew, illustrations by Pierre-Joseph Redoute:

“This showy member of the iris family is very closely allied to the true irises and indeed will hybridize with Iris dichotoma to produce a remarkable range of intermediate offspring. Belamcanda chinensis is the only species in the genus. The flower, with its six equal perianth segments and three slender style branches, is in fact quite different in structure from that of an iris, in which the six perianth segment are separated into falls and standards and the style branches are flattened and petal-like. The fruits also are rather distinctive, with capsules opening to reveal large black seeds; hence the name Blackberry Lily used in some countries.

“Like Iris, Belamcanda produces a fan of flat leaves from a small rhizome and in summer sends up a branching flower stem from the centre of the leaf cluster. This stem can reach 2.5 metres in wild specimens, but it is usually much less than this in cultivation. Each flower is of rather short duration, but because there is a succession of them, quite a striking display is produced over a considerable period of time. Although individual plants are usually short-lived, seeds are freely produced and the young plants rapidly reach maturity. Belamcanda is a native of China, Japan, Taiwan and the Himalayan region….

“The root has been used to cure sore throats and fevers and is also recommended as an antidote to poisons, in particular the bite of a cobra.”

Hello!

I had never really thought of these flowers as “slow-motion fireworks” — as they’re described in the first quotation above — but, you know, the description fits. And it fairly well applies to my photos below of Iris domestica from Oakland Cemetery’s gardens, where these little delights tend to grow at the very outer edges of tree-shade, so pick up a lot of filtered sunlight or backlighting. The result is that they glow against dark backgrounds, and the camera does a nice job of capturing the flower petal highlights while keeping the colors and shapes of the stems and buds intact.

As is often the case with popular flowers, you can choose a common name for this one from a long list. Leopard Lily, Leopard Flower, or Blackberry Lily are frequently used, but you could also pick Candy Lily, Freckle Face, Butterfly Lily, or Fire Lily; or replace “lily” with “iris” and have a whole new set of names. They all reflect either the color pattern or shape of the flowers, or (for Blackberry Lily) the plant’s habit of producing fat seedpods that turn black late in the season. “Lily” has stuck as part of the plant’s moniker, though — as we all know, don’t we? — it’s actually an iris. Iris domestica is its proper current scientific name; but that’s a recent enough development in botanical history that the previous scientific name — Belamcanda chinensis — hangs around in a lot of botany or gardening books and other sources. I wrote about the name change history last year: see Iris Domestica, the Leopard Flower or Blackberry Lily (1 of 3) if you would like to read more about it.

With that previous set of photos, I also wrote about encountering these irises shortly after a long-duration high-wind thunderstorm had passed through the neighborhood, bending many of them to the ground. Some had obviously been broken or uprooted, with the flowers still intact, stems split like cut flowers in a vase. I wondered if they’d return this year, so was glad to find them — even as a less robust crop than I had seen previously. Then again, the presence of fewer flowers gave me a chance to capture singular stems and flowers against their shaded black or dark green backgrounds, so for The Photographer, that worked out nicely.

Thanks for taking a look!

White and Purple Irises

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From “Dalmatica and English Nurserymen” in Classic Irises and the Men and Women Who Created Them by Clarence Mahan:

“[Peter] Barr and his sons Peter Rudolph and William were leading breeders of irises. Beginning with the introduction of a reddish-violet iris named Garibaldi in 1873, the Barrs produced scores of new irises. These Barr irises were highly regarded in their day. Mention has already been made of the Pallida Dalmatica look-alike Princess Beatrice. A few of the other popular Barr varieties were brownish-yellow Bronze Beauty, light blue-violet Alice Barr, blue-violet Khedive, and yellow and red-violet ‘Robert Burns’….

“One of Peter Barr’s lasting contributions to the world of garden irises was the gift of a special vocabulary. Garden writer and iris hybridizer Sydney B. Mitchell explained how this came about in his book Iris for Every Garden:

“‘About 1873 Barr issued a descriptive list of his extensive collection [of irises], arranging the varieties in groups: aphylla (including forms of germanica), amoena (white standards and purple falls), neglecta (lavender standards and dark falls), pallida (lavender, light and dark blue, and rosy-toned purple selfs), squalens (forms with blended, often rather dull, combinations of smoky blue and gray or yellow and red), and variegata (clear yellow standards and falls either veined a dark red or nearly solid ox-blood color). Barr’s classification was adopted and continued in English and American lists into the nineteen-twenties. Even to this day such terms as ‘amoena’ and ‘variegata’ are applied to modern hybrids of these old color patterns.’

“The terms ‘amoena,’ ‘neglecta,’ and ‘variegata’ continue to be used by those who write and talk about irises in the 21st century. These words refer to the color patterns described by Barr and form an enduring element of iris argot. It is, after all, easier to say than an iris cultivar is a ‘neglecta’ than to say that it is a ‘violet or purple iris with standards that are lighter in color than its falls.”

Hello!

This is the last of my iris posts for 2024 — unless I come across some of the very late bloomers, like the Leopard Lily (Iris domestica), which I can often find in July. The galleries below show those I photographed with white or nearly white standards and contrasting shades of purple in their falls. Toward the middle, you will also see some that have a thin white border around the edges of the purple petals, providing an extra touch of pizazz.

Separate from any scientific or botanical names, descriptions of iris color schemes have their own names — such as amoena and neglecta — which are explained in the quotation at the top of the post. The term “amoena” refers to an iris with white standards and colored (in this case, purple) falls, and “neglecta” is more ambiguously used to describe an iris where the standards and falls show distinct variations (light and dark, typically) of the same color, such as blue, purple, or violet. If you would like to read about some of the other terms used to describe iris colors, see (with pictures!) Iris Flower Patterns from the National Gardening Association.

While I’d heard some of these terms before, I don’t think I realized that they were an important part of understanding iris colors and talking or writing about them. Perhaps they fill the gap I’ve run into frequently, that it’s quite difficult to identify individual iris variants when you come across them in a garden or from photographs (unless you bought them at a garden center and kept their “my name is” tag). Assuming I photograph them again next year (and hunt down some new ones), I think I may try to separate them by these “official” color categories, just for the sake of learning how to apply them to my discoveries.

Thanks for taking a look!

Gold Standards and Purple Falls

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From “Iris” in The English Flower Garden by William Robinson:

“The Iris is one of the oldest of our garden flowers, in many forms too, but… it has come to us in greater novelty and beauty in recent years….

“The old Irises of our gardens are usually of the Germanica class; there is much variety among these groups, and they are very hardy and precious, and excellent for the adornment of gardens and even walls and thatched roofs, as we see in France, the Iris of this great group having a valuable power of thriving on such surfaces as well as on good soil.

“There is a group of waterside and water-loving Iris, much less seen in our gardens than the above, and some of them not yet come to us, but of great value. They are allied to the common yellow Iris of our watercourses, but are taller and richer in colour, the golden Iris (aurea), Monnieri, and ochroleuca being the best known so far, and very free, hardy, and beautiful plants they are, thriving, too, almost anywhere, but best in rich, moist soil….

“Then there are the brilliant purple and gold Iris reticulata and its allies, little bulbous Irises, for the spring garden, early and charming things, many beautiful; Irises that flower in winter and early spring, like the Algerian Iris; others happy in Britain on warm soils and warm corners, and some for the rock garden, like the crested Iris; and the many pretty forms of Iris pumila, of some of which edgings were made in old gardens….”

From “Variegata” in A Guide to Bearded Irises: Cultivating the Rainbow for Beginners and Enthusiasts by Kelly Norris:

“Variegata: An iris with yellow or near-yellow standards and darker falls of brown, red, or purple…

“Named for Iris variegata, this distinctive bicolor pattern is well represented in all six classes. In tall beardeds, cultivars include ‘Jurassic Park’ (Lauer 1995), ‘Mine’ (Headrick 2004), ‘Kathy Chilton’ (Kerr 2006), and ‘Born to Please’ (Rogers 2006)….

“The original pattern of yellow and brown still colors many irises in the MTB class but has probably tired just as many gardeners because of its limitations. I mean really, how many ways can you do yellow-brown-red in variation before it becomes a little trite? But jaded eyes aside, the variegata pattern makes great art in the landscape. The pattern plays off the familiar colors of yellow and purple in other plants, while jazzing up the color display more than something white or pink might.”

Hello!

The irises in this series have some similarities to those I posted previously as Brown Iris Mix — but I separated these out because they have a more distinct variations between the colors of the standards and the falls. Shades of gold and yellow-gold (rather than brown) dominate the standards, with purple tones filling the falls. Admittedly the distinction is a little ambiguous, but you may also see more stippling through these flower petals, suggesting that they are different variants than those in the earlier batch. There is a reasonably good chance that some or all these irises would be correctly identified as Iris variegata L. — often referred to as a “Hungarian Iris” in some parts of the world — but (as we sometimes say here) nobody knows for sure….

🙂

Until I found the first quotation about irises that I posted above, I was unaware of the practice in France of growing irises on rooftops. If you would like to see some examples — which may also include other European countries where irises are grown up high — click here. And if you’d like to see some additional irises in color schemes like those I photographed, they are Jurassic Park, Mine, Kathy Chilton, and Born to Please, from the second quotation above.

Thanks for taking a look!